Choosing notebooks is becoming difficult to do because of so many choices and options to weigh. And if choosing hardware is not hard enough, notebook manufacturers bundle their products with softwares that are usually junk or something that you do not need.

One very common example is Windows Vista OS. Vista comes with every notebook, or computer for that matter, and buyers usually have to pay for it even if they do not want it. Some prefer to downgrade to Windows XP while some just have no other choice but to purchase the OS license only to wipe it off from their notebooks and replace it with Linux.

As a consumer, we have the right to choose which products we want to buy. And in some cases, notebook manufacturers do not seem to give buyers to choose if they want to buy OS or not. That really sucks because Vista OS licenses can cost at least $100, and customers are only paying for the license, therefore do not own the software. Why would you want to pay for something that you do not, and will never, own?

Fortunately, there are some people who actually read the End User License Agreement or EULA of Windows licenses and use it to their own advantage. Take for example uncle_benji, the author of equiliberate.org, who bought an HP notebook bundled with Vista. He chose to waive his purchase of Windows Vista license in favor of using Linux, and got his money back, almost the same amount of the retail price of Vista.

One of the prominent features of notebooks today is the presence of the touchpad in place of a mouse. My Acer 5570 notebook has Synaptics Touchpad which is compatible with Linux systems that I have installed. Though the settings of Synpatics are present by default on systems, you can tweak the settings to match your preferences. read more

These days, $1000 lands you a pretty well rounded budget laptop. You can easily get 2GB of memory, 120GB or more of hard disk space, 802.11b/g wireless networking, and dedicated multimedia shortcut keys that let you watch DVDs or view documents without booting into Windows. The Acer and Dell laptops in our list even sported HDMI connections, extras we didn’t expect at this price point. Read more here.